


Hogwarts Mania!!!

by Acrylico



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Headmistress Minerva McGonagall, Hogwarts Fourth Year, Manticore, OC Story, Potions, Prophecy, Rating May Change, Rowling is a TERF, Slug Club, Tags May Change, a whole gang of useless slytherins, tripping so hard you see the future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 08:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21115733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acrylico/pseuds/Acrylico
Summary: On the Hogwarts Express in his fourth year, loner Hufflepuff student Eugene Nardole drinks a defective potion to help with his insomnia. Instead, he gets a terrible case of polyps and a prophecy of destruction. By unimaginable bad luck, Slytherin Ken McLarkin gets roped into decoding the mystery after he encounters Eugene in a train compartment by himself.A tiger in Hogwarts Lake, a man with a camera, and a seemingly harmless girl all seem to have nothing in common when an era of trouble has recently come to an end. But what happens when it is all more than it seems? What happens next?Join us on the next episode of Hogwarts Mania!!!(I don't care if you like it, I'm posting it anyways you goons.)





	Hogwarts Mania!!!

Mr. Nardole's piercing shrieks echoed throughout the Hogwarts Express. Or at least on any normal train they would have, these compartments were gratuitously shlopped with sound-proofing magic and privacy charms. The only ones who had a chance of hearing were the next compartment over, who got faint glimpses of muffled sounds. The trolley lady also heard, from her hallway the next car down, but wheeled her sweets over ever-so-slowly in hesitation. Whether it was fear or sloth was left up to interpretation; the seemingly immortal lady (who has occupied the train for as long as any living wizard could remember) wasn’t privvy to being fooled by silly pranks or teenage antics anymore than the headmistress herself was. She pushed a gray and frizzy piece of hair behind her ear, scooting along with caution.

Ken McLarkin from the window seat in the next compartment from the screaming child’s was also less than hasty. Two other Slytherin boys prodded at him and egged him on, settling on a bet:

“Stand.”

“Stand.”

“Hit.”

Darius, a more angular young man with a shaved head, placed an ace atop his three cards, flipping the dealer’s card to reveal an eight.

“Ken’s gone over,” he says.

“No I haven’t.”

Darius stretches his hands over to the other boy's cards, giving them a close look-over and pointing at the ten on top. “You have a twenty-three, mate.”

“Does it _ have _to be me?” Ken asked; his voice was whiny and dramatic.

“Ye fecking coward. What’dya suggest we do then?”

“I reckon we could all go?”

Regan and Darius snapped their heads to look at each other, and threw themselves into a fit of laughter. The kind of laughter with teeth and red faces, pointing fingers at him, huffing out halves of words. They both understood what this laughter was, but Ken found himself oddly intimidated and even moreso confused. His thick eyebrows fell in on eachother.

“Little Kenny wants to go home!”

“Little Kenny’s holdin’ his mums hand and wee’d in ‘is shorts--”

“If we all go, there’s a chance all three of us could get killed by whatever it is...” Darius roared with laughter, falling over into Regan’s arm, who pushed him away.

Ken sighs loudly, rolling his eyes. He got up from his spot by the window, and opened the doorway out. Turning back toward the other boys, he mocked them quietly, “little Kenny wants to go home”. His hand flapped and his expression was a playful sort of sour. He really did hate those guys.

In the hall, the trolley lady creeped at a snail’s pace to the door. Her face was paled. She clearly didn’t want it to be her responsibility. So instead, Ken McLarkin was her saving grace, busting through with his long arm extending through the door, and the sunshine hitting his face like a blanket of yellow-blue.

The true magnitude of the screeching was something that the three boys in the car, the trolley lady, and Merlin himself may have underestimated.

The boy was just under one-hundred sixty-five centimeters, lurching his head forward into another scream. A scream like an ugly baby, promptly removed from the womb and quickly brought back to the store for a return. A scream like an amplifier when the metal plug drops to the ground, and one just like the most deafening sound you will ever hear.

His face was dark red and spotted, like the effects of a Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. His yellow and black tie, brown-black bedhead hairs, and small stature made him look even more pitiable to a long-looking Slytherin boy like him. Eugene Nardole, an apothecary’s son, a halfblood wizard, and a chaser for the Hufflepuff Quidditch team. His compartment on the Hogwarts Express was empty except for him, only sitting with a pack and a bottle labelled, neatly handwritten, “Potion of Sweet Dreams”. It was most definitely a potion gone wrong, but even at that, his very presence pleaded for a merciful end.

Solutions quickly ran themselves through Kenny’s mind:

  1. Turning the other way would probably not solve anything.
  2. Any big spells would get them in trouble.
  3. He needed a charm.
  4. He knew one that might do.

He removed a long laurel-wood wand from the inside of his sock, swished it around a bit, and shouted: “Silencio!”

And it failed, only making his voice even more irritatingly loud. He hunched over, and covered his ears in regretful silence.

Ken McLarkin stood idle for only a moment, before a resourceful thought came to his mind. Swiftly removing a large roll of grey from his deep pockets (which were enchanted by what he called “the charm of deepened pockets”), he hesitated for about five seconds, hands inquisitively on his chin. Then the tape made a loud ‘crack’ before being forced onto a screaming mouth. After which, time had slowed to a stop, relieving a tense situation like a temple massage and a warm bath.

Eugene’s eyes closed as he puffed out a sigh of relief from his free nostrils, shoulders unclenching. He looked up toward Ken, breaking his tense character with an adorable smile and wave. Ken returned the gesture.

“You okay there, mate?”

And unfortunately, the screams began again, all but only slightly muffled by the grey patch of duct tape. Eugene put up a finger, searching through a tattered, muddy pack. A few quill pens fell out, along with a bound leather notebook. In this he wrote:

_ Faulty potion. Meant to use Valerian in Sleeping Draught, ended up using dried Hogweed. _

A loud shout came from behind the tape, and his voice only became shriller and shriller.

Hogweed, as Kenny knew after sitting through Slughorn’s lectures and attentively taking notes, was a somewhat restricted ingredient that certified apothecaries and medical professionals used in potions. Its side effects were often far greater than its uses, a minor poison only used for truth serums and other miscellaneous psychological effects.

“Yeah, easy mistake alright! I’m going to go get some help--”

Eugene looked down at his notebook, furiously scribbling.

_ No, don’t tell! Please! _

“What do you reckon I do, then? I don’t do good under this much pressure!”

_ I need you to use a sleeping charm. _

“Dangerous?! If I used a sleeping charm on you, you might not wake up!”

_ No, what muggles do sometimes. Sleeping cold or something. _

“_ You mean a sleeper hold--?! _”

Kenny’s exclamation almost pierced past the compartment walls, muffled by a hand quickly clapping over his mouth.

He’d been starting to feel like the bet was rigged and mugglephobic, although truthfully it wasn’t, and the deck was pure unmagic. Or so went through his head, as he looked Eugene right in the eye, squinted from a distorted screaming face.

“What do you mean by dangerous?”

Eugene nodded, and wrote another note: _ I will admit that in addition to the mix-up I made it a bit extra potent. Probably why it took so long to hit. I suspect maybe… something might fall out where it’s not supposed to. The second one I drank isn’t hitting either-- _

On cue, the boy slumped over out of nowhere, dropping his ink quill to the ground and leaving a long line from the last letter he wrote. Kenny had realized truly how much of an enigma this boy was, having been surprised by him a third time within the minute, and also how exhausting that was. He draped Eugene’s arm over his shoulder awkwardly, looking at the dude with a quizzical look on his face.

“Hey, Hufflesnuff, are you still alive?” 

The trolley lady had slowly peeped her face through the window in mortification in the turmoil, two other sets of footsteps soon approached. The two appeared at the window of the door, slamming it open with the force of three storms.

“Dear lord.”

Adira Vanity, Gryffindor Sixth Year Prefect.

“McLarkin, what on Earth?”

And fortunately, Bevvs Norwood, Slytherin Prefect, Seventh Year.

* * *

In the meantime, Eugene’s unconsciousness proved to be a harder trek than the average blackout. The screaming potion slowly crept into his brain, a more serious matter than anyone had expected. His head was starting to burn, like a vicious scorpion burrowing in between his eyes.

A slow light started to form behind his eyelids, that he could see at least. A large serpent forming into various visions and hypotheticals. Scents of iron. He heard an indistinguishable voice in his head, “I’ll give you something to scream about.” The haggard and scratchy feminine voice left behind traces of malignant terror, like an ink wash over the dream he never thought he’d have.

Images of the castle flowed past his eyes like thousands of pictures that don’t move. They got darker and darker as night fell, a low rumbling static in his ears got louder as a bloodied tiger floated to the top of a Hogwarts Lake that remained in the midground. There was a young man with slicked back, shiny hair in the moonlight. A camera flashing in his face. He was laughing as the bubbling noise quieted to an echo, uncontrollably close. He could feel his breath.

He saw an older girl in a charred red tie, crushed under the rubble of a bridge.

He heard someone in the a wet, windy darkness, whispering. Whimpering. They reminded him faintly of someone whose name evaded him.

There was also a faint odor of death, and an image of a manticore snarling and---

There was a girl in blue named Dorothy, that he remembered from her long, curled hair. She was smiling sickeningly wide, holding a glowing wand up to the air, as his vision faded to black.

A voice inside him screamed something loud and terrible, unintelligible. Something bloodthirsty, like it was scraping away the insides of his eardrums, the doors to his head; it was coming into his brain to kill him.

And all of Eugene’s dream was brief, like a flash, less than a second.

The dream began to fold itself away within him, until all that was left was the back of his eyelids.

* * *

The Hufflepuff boy awoke screaming. But this time, it was truly something to scream about. He finally felt the pain in his throat, however, and the scream died somewhere within his vocal chords. Looking around him, Eugene noticed the two Prefects, Kenny, sweating from his browline, and the trolley lady, pulling a magical first-aid kit from the bottom of her cart. Something in her back made a gross popping sound.

“Mr. Nardole, it’s good to see that ye woke up,” Adira Vanity said, her expression uncharacteristically concerned (although, still not very). She held an ice pack up to his forehead, which felt painfully cold. Sobering.

The boy finally felt awake enough to attempt to squeeze out a response, only to have his voice fall on deaf ears. Or, as he realized, his voice was completely gone.

“Don’t try to talk-- Good God, it seems like Kenny was right. You okay, lad?”

He nodded, not able to stop staring at a hair sticking out of place on his head.

“Anymore screaming and you would’ve been in Saint Mungo’s! We’re gonna have to take you to McGonagal’s though, lad. Figure out what happened.”

“_ Yeah… _ ” he managed to squeak out, “ _ sorry for the trouble, _ ” ( _ and thanks for the ice pack, my head is killing me.) _ Everything that came out afterward was silence. And the responses that followed were misty and muddled through a field of half-liddedness. They didn’t matter--too much, anyways. He just needed a rest. Which quickly came again after the exhaustion of that night caught up to him, words turning to ambiance. Kenny's blazer was oddly comfortable, as its plushness slowly charmed him into a deep period of unthinking.

And for the first time that week, Eugene had indeed had a peaceful sleep, accompanied by the Sweetest of Dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed! If you didn't, you can let me know why and I'll probably sit and cry real hard while reading your comments. I wrote this initial chapter as a Creative Writing Assignment (but really I stretched the prompt because I got the weirdest idea for a HP fanfiction nonetheless.) Obviously if you loved the characters within the original series, they're not going to be a main focus within the series, but I really hope you like my take on the Universe. For fans of the supporting cast, some of our faves will get a bigger part.
> 
> I don't expect the market for this kind of thing to exist at all, but Mrs. OJ said it was pretty alright so I think that's good enough. If you're there, thanks for reading.


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